[beeswax]

After a brief but successful test, I just finished upgrading my various devices in the house to the latest Leia nightly. The last step was to upgrade the MicroServer, which is headless and running Windows Server 2012 R2 64-bit.  I need one constantly running Kodi instance in order for the library to be updated when new media is added and this worked fine with 17.x.

I'm using 20180327-d6910ff8-master-x64 for this test.  As the 17.6 install on the server was 32-bit, I did also try the matching 32-bit nightly but the results were the same.  I realise the error message from this debug log is pretty self explanatory however as 17.x works OK, I assume there's something that can be done.  Here's the debug log from Leia: https://pastebin.com/2D0U8gqd

Compared with the log from 17.x: https://pastebin.com/cKRUEHgD

The important bit seems to be that Krypton perseveres after the first DXGI error:

Trying to create device with lowest feature level: 0xb000
Trying to create device without video API support.

at which point it works.  Leia seems to hit the first DXGI error and gives up.

edit: just realised, I should have tried the official alpha build rather than a nightly, same result though: https://pastebin.com/kk0ejScF

[GavinCampbell]

Same error here.  I run kodi on a Hyper-V VM to scrape my library.  v17 works perfectly.  v18 gives the same error as above.  I've tried nightlies, 32 and 64.  No luck.

Hopefully they can see something in your log that is stopping this from working.

[beeswax]

I've done some further testing.  After giving up on the Microserver, I tried another of my Windows Server 2012 R2 machines but ran into the same problem.  I was able to get that one working by simply installing the proper graphics driver (Intel HD 4000).  I know I've run Kodi 17 on that machine before and it didn't care about the lack of a driver.

After that success, I looked again at the MicroServer, sure enough that was also missing its display driver so I installed that, rebooted and tried Kodi 18 again - still the same problem.  Here's the full debug log from the Microserver now it has the display driver installed:  https://pastebin.com/mwmjN9BS

As you can see, it now detects the Matrox G200eh (HP) WDDM 1.2 video card and it's various supported resolutions/refresh rates but then still bombs out with the same error.  Note, I did connect a monitor and run this in a proper interactive session, this was not over RDP.  Also note that the second machine with the Intel HD 4000 will happily run v18 in an RDP session so there's no inherent issue with v18 and RDP on Server 2012.

[wsnipex]

Kodi requires a reasonable GFX card and driver support and headless is (still) not supported.

[beeswax]

Fair enough.  Just out or curiosity then, what changed between Krypton and Leia that caused this to stop working?  It seems Krypton would happily run on any old machine, even if it lacked a proper display driver and was being accessed over RDP.

[wsnipex]

thousands of lines of code changed while large parts of Videoplayer were rewritten in order to support modern formats like hevc 4k@ 60Hz and lay groundwork for supporting headless in the future.

[beeswax]

Just as a follow up on this, I've been using Leia nightlies on the server with an Intel HD 4000 for a while now without problem but after a recent update, it stopped launching again.  I'm hoping that because I've pinned down the exact nightly when this broke, it'll be easier to track down than the original breakage which was simply "somewhere between Krypton and Leia"!

On KodiSetup-20180528-b9a71898-master-x64, it all worked but on KodiSetup-20180529-795b10a6-master-x64, it broke and is still broken as of the latest nightly.  Here are debug logs from both versions:

KodiSetup-20180528-b9a71898-master-x64
KodiSetup-20180529-795b10a6-master-x64

[scott967]

I'm guessing related to the crash reported in Trac and here: 332436 (thread)

scott s.
.